If there’s one thing digital has done it is to explode the creation and production of digital stuff. It requires herculean efforts to focus on quality in a digital environment because digital tools are so relentlessly focused on quantity. Digital feeds and accelerates a culture o … | Continue reading
Let’s Green The Web is a five-day Twitter campaign starting this week (Monday 15) to encourage and support everybody to measure the carbon emissions of websites and share tweets highlighting the results. Let’s Green The Web aims to “both encourage, as well as support, those who r … | Continue reading
Modern technology is causing us to lose our capacity to think ahead, to plan, to prioritize, to design with any degree of depth. The Cloud says that we can store and save everything. Google says we don’t have to organize anything. And there’s an app for everything. AI is making u … | Continue reading
Technology is the problem. Our elites have failed us. So much of humanity is Trumpian, invested in global gaslighting, in greedy, narcissistic bling, in climbing the pyramid scheme, in fetishizing the Great Man and dancing to some grand illusion of some glorious past and some ‘pu … | Continue reading
The most sustainable Web design is maintenance. The greatest creativity is reuse. Fixing what you have nearly always reduces waste and increases value more than buying something new. One of the core principles at Netlife, a Norwegian digital design agency, is: “We make what human … | Continue reading
“When I was working for Ruter (a Norwegian public transit company), one of the key principles was that people should travel with us without having to think,” Beth Stensen, CEO of Netlife, a Norwegian digital design agency states. “And I asked why? What’s so bad about thinking? Wh … | Continue reading
How do you work sustainably as a digital professional? If you are a producer of code or content then you are a producer of CO2. How do you ensure your digital activities produce as little CO2 as possible? Better still, how do you ensure that your digital work is useful enough tha … | Continue reading
One of the most important things I’ve learned as a result of observing the voting intentions of some 500,000 people in more than 100 countries is that there are indeed top tasks that are universal. With Toyota we found that there are universal top tasks in relation to how Europea … | Continue reading
Timnit Gebru, a leader and pioneer in the ethics of Artificial Intelligence at Google, was working with colleagues on a new research paper. The paper addressed some of the dangers inherent in the Google approach to AI, including data center energy consumption and the impact on ma … | Continue reading
In 2020 we will create, capture, copy, and consume almost 60 zettabytes of data. By 2025, it will be 200 zettabytes. By 2035, there will be more than 2,000 zettabytes of data in the world. In my interview with data expert Nick Evanson I asked him to calculate how much it would co … | Continue reading
We need good science today more than ever. We need a calm, logical, rigorous, scientific way of thinking and acting. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, science and the scientific community often let society down. We must understand why and what must be done to lessen the chan … | Continue reading
When it comes to making products, the technology industry has a circular economy. It goes to poorer countries and pays them as little as possible for the raw materials. Once the products are old, it dumps the e-waste back in poor countries where it will be ‘recycled’. The recycli … | Continue reading
In the physical world, there are certain speed limits beyond which there is a huge jump in energy requirements and a major jump in dangers for humans. These limits exist in the digital world too. As speed increases, energy demands rise, waste explodes and the likelihood of humans … | Continue reading
Using more and more energy does not lead to more happiness. After a certain point there are diminishing returns. In fact, too much energy leads to obesity in the body and overload in the mind. “The drastic increases in societies’ energy use seen in recent decades have, beyond a c … | Continue reading
Which is more efficient at searching: the human brain or Google? The average Google search takes about .2 seconds to process, consuming about .3 watts per search. The human brain consumes about 20 watts of energy every hour, or .005 watts per second. For a brain to do a “search” … | Continue reading
Humans are not used to abundance. For millions of years, we wanted. A steady supply of food was rarely guaranteed. It is only in the last 100 years that food has become more abundant. We can’t cope. It’s estimated that one-third of food that is bought is wasted. Even much of the … | Continue reading
Albert Speer was one of the few Nazis who reflected on what he did and felt some form of guilt. He was Hitler’s architect, and in the later stages of World War II he took over armaments manufacturing and oversaw tremendous increases in production by bringing in new management tec … | Continue reading
The history of technology is about extending and replacing human energy. We are at a point now where increasing amounts of our energy are going to waste because we are using technology out of convenience and laziness rather than for productive motives. The consequences for oursel … | Continue reading
The fourth principle of Digital Earth Experience design is to “Delete 90%”. The illusion of cheap storage has encouraged by far the worst hoarding habits in human history. We are drowning in digital crap, and it’s going to get much, much worse. Most organizations haven’t even beg … | Continue reading
The first principle is to not create. Not doing anything with digital is the kindest thing you can do for the environment. The decisions that you make not to create that extra piece of code, that extra piece of content, these are the most important decisions you can make. If you … | Continue reading
The greatest challenge we have today both in the physical and digital world is waste. It’s not an energy production problem we have. It’s a waste production problem. The defining characteristic of “rich” world culture is profligate waste. We create, for example, so much plastic w … | Continue reading
“Domination” is Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite word. He illustrates better than most the domineering Tech Bros win-at-all-costs, use-all-means-to-get-to-your-ends approach. From the first time I heard him gush about “community” the hairs on my neck stood up. There was something deepl … | Continue reading
If 50 million websites are actively using Google Analytics, then according to my calculations this could be resulting in 100 million kg of CO2 pollution a year. You’d need to plant 10 million trees to deal with that sort of pollution. Most of these 50 million websites will find o … | Continue reading
The most substantial pollution from Google Analytics comes from the processing and analysis of the data. Let’s assume that the analytics data from each of the 50 million websites using Google Analytics requires 30 seconds per day of processing from Google servers. These servers t … | Continue reading
Every time you access a webpage that is using Google Analytics, about 22 KB of data is sent to Google. If we estimate that there are 500 million pages being accessed every day then that’s about 4 million GB of data per year. We’d need to plant 1,656 trees to deal with the polluti … | Continue reading
The most dangerous cost is the cost closest to zero. The most dangerous concept is cheap. The cost close to zero easily becomes invisible. We don’t see it so we don’t think it exists, and that makes us consume with abandon, that makes us waste at will. That which is cheap—or, wor … | Continue reading
Words: Whether it is text or voice, words are how a digital designer primarily thinks. The best designers spend enough time to choose the right word because the right words drive the right actions. Code: Words without code are print. Without good code there can be no Web and the … | Continue reading
Many organizations have not really adapted to the Web but rather have made the Web adapt to them and their print processes, their print thinking and their print culture. The characteristics of a print culture are: You are creating a fixed, contained, physical thing. It is much mo … | Continue reading
COVID-19 has exposed many organizations as being unable to react quickly enough. When a pandemic has the potential to grow exponentially, decisions that can mitigate against its growth need to be made very quickly. Information that loss of smell was a key symptom for COVID-19 beg … | Continue reading
A unique strength of the Web over all other communications channels is its ability to efficiently collect, analyze, organize and publish user-generated content. The combination of digital technology and the wisdom of the crowds is a powerful, revolutionary force. A perfect exampl … | Continue reading
Has the Web helped or hindered in dealing with COVID-19? That sounds like a crazy question. Surely, unequivocally, the Web has helped. Just like print opened up the world to new ideas, right? “During the first century after Gutenberg’s invention, print did as much to perpetuate b … | Continue reading
A specific strength of the Toyota culture is to come up with innovative ways to visualize problems. This is a particularly critical skill when it comes to digital because digital is a reduced sense environment. It’s very hard to get a ‘feel’ for digital problems. Usually, everyth … | Continue reading
The Top Tasks data helped focus the conversation in Toyota about quality and reliability. In a company that is obsessed by quality, it became natural to ask: What is a quality digital experience? How do you measure digital quality? To get the answer to these questions, Toyota wen … | Continue reading
I remember once hearing about how Toyota launched in the US. The US car manufacturers were certain it was going to fail because it had a very thinly dispersed dealer and service network. What these manufacturers missed was that Toyota didn’t need a dealer or service center every … | Continue reading
A company I helped found launched an online community back in the late Nineties. We got substantial funding and at one stage had more than 50 people working on designing and promoting it. We opened up lots of forums and discussion boards. What we learned very quickly was that wit … | Continue reading
One of the core reasons why we don’t have a lot more quality Web design is the organizational excuse that we’re different, our audiences are different, we’re exceptional. The argument of exceptionalism is lazy. It is a primitive urge. The exceptionalists hate evidence and love gu … | Continue reading
Website design is still more amateur than professional. Most websites would not pass a basic quality control test. There is nothing more basic on the Web than the speed at which a page downloads. Fast downloading pages have passed the first mark of quality. Slow downloading pages … | Continue reading
Here’s the classification we tested in round two: WHO, Government Guidance, Education, Training Mental, Physical Wellbeing Vaccine, Immunity, Treatment Research, Statistics Virus Survival, Spread, Mutation Avoiding Infection Symptoms, Diagnosis News End Date, New Outbreaks At Ris … | Continue reading
Over 800 healthcare providers, academics, and members of the public sorted COVID-19 top tasks into groups. We analyzed the groups and came up with the following hypothetical classification: Symptoms, Diagnosis, SpreadMental & Physical WellbeingWHO, Government Guidance, Education, … | Continue reading
Design with people. Not for people. Before we are German, Irish or Canadian, we are human. And humans think the same way. Dream the same way. Organize the same way. There are mental maps out there in humanity. We just need to discover them. With the Web, we have the platform and … | Continue reading
A link is a promise. A menu is a selection of promises. Without the link there is no Web. Links make the Web. From links we build the Web. Links. So often forgotten in the design process. So often neglected. Why? Because the rewards always go to the “creatives”. Those who create … | Continue reading
It’s never been more important for people to have speedy access to the right information. Until we have a vaccine, information is our vaccine. Until we have a vaccine, testing is our vaccine. Even when we have a vaccine, we will still need to provide lots of quality information. … | Continue reading
“Democracy improves as more people participate,” Audrey Tang, the digital minister of Taiwan, wrote for The New York Times in 2019. “And digital technology remains one of the best ways to improve participation—as long as the focus is on finding common ground and creating consensu … | Continue reading
Countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Germany have been successful at containing COVID-19 because they test relentlessly, get results back quickly, and use the data from the testing to trace and isolate. Until we have a vaccine, data is our vaccine. We need the right data … | Continue reading
In digital, I’m forever copying and pasting, and saving as. In digital, it’s so easy to create copies. Sometimes, when I’m writing and I’m not happy with a sentence, I’ll delete the whole sentence and start again, even though it might have been better to work on the original sent … | Continue reading
The coronavirus is indicative of a sick Earth, a stressed and stretched Nature. In our pockets, in our hands, beside our ears, lie devices that contain the stories of how and why the Earth is so sick, of how we have in the last forty years, partaken of a mad and frenzied party of … | Continue reading
Sometimes I wonder how I can tie my shoelaces. I think how stupid I am. I used to think that Amazon was this amazing model for the future. That customer obsessed was a way all organizations should be. There were these nagging doubts that I simply ignored. Okay, Amazon treats its … | Continue reading
There are many ways that digital can create pollution. Let’s start by looking at how much data we use and what pollution it causes. Analysis by Cisco indicates that an average US citizen is using 140 gigabytes (GB) of data a month. What sort of pollution is that causing? That’s n … | Continue reading